The Commentator Europe Could Not Ignore

Latin and Hebrew readers in medieval Europe knew Averroes by a title rather than a name, the Commentator, a shorthand that reflected how thoroughly his systematic commentaries on Aristotle came to define how Western scholars accessed Aristotle's thought once his works began circulating in translation from the mid thirteenth century onward. Commissioned by the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf to make Aristotle more accessible, Averroes produced three tiers of commentary on most of the surviving Aristotelian corpus, short paraphrases, middle length expositions, and long, sentence by sentence commentaries that reproduced Aristotle's own text before analyzing it, an approach later adopted directly by scholastic commentators including Thomas Aquinas, who cites Averroes constantly even while arguing against him. Averroes's own reading of Aristotle, particularly on the nature of the intellect, generated a distinct and controversial school in Latin universities known as Latin Averroism, associated with philosophers such as Siger of Brabant, who pushed Averroes's positions toward conclusions the Catholic Church would later condemn. That controversy means Averroes's influence in medieval Europe outlived and in some ways outgrew his influence in the Islamic world, where his rationalist philosophy found a less receptive audience after his own lifetime.